Susan B. Weiner Investment Writing - Susan B. Weiner Blog

What can an exhibit about the Civil War teach you about communications? I took away six lessons from “Torn in Two: 150th Anniversary of the Civil War,” which runs until Dec. 31, 2011, at the Boston Public Library’s map center.

Torn in Two, an image featured in the Boston Public Library exhibit of the same name

Lesson 1: Summarize your message for people who don’t want to delve into details.

When I visited this map-heavy exhibit, I didn’t look closely at many of the maps. Instead, I happily read the large-type wall labels that conveyed each section’s theme.

Lesson 2: Combine words with images.

Even though I’m a big reader, I wouldn’t have entered an exhibit that consisted solely of words. In fact, it was the exhibit’s signature image of two men tugging on opposite sides of a map that attracted me.

Lesson 3: Tell stories.

My favorite part of the exhibit was “Hear Our Stories,” featuring 10 fictional characters describing their lives at each stage of the Civil War.

Lesson 4: Appeal to your audience’s demographics.

The variety and specifics of the characters was compelling. To give you some flavor, they included

• Isaiah Wilkes, seminary student, abolitionist, Roxbury, Mass., age 16
• Rebecca Parrish, slave, South Carolina, age perhaps 20
• Elizabeth Farnsworth, educated girl of means, Civil War nurse, Concord, Mass., age 16
• John Tilden, non-slave-owning crop farmer, Georgia, age 35

However, I was disappointed to learn later from a brochure that these were fictional characters. The lesson for financial bloggers? Make it clear if you’re using composite characters to illustrate a story.

Lesson 5: Help your audience relate your information to themselves.

I picked up a family activity brochure about slavery at the exhibit. It started by suggesting questions for adults to ask children, such as, “Are you allowed to read?” These questions put the children at the center of the conversation, in addition to providing context for an adult-child discussion of how slaves had few choices.

Lesson 6: Write about your passions.

I suspect that the creators of this exhibit felt excited about their topic. This passion, plus adept use of Lessons 1 through 5 sparked an interesting exhibit.

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Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

The CFP ad campaign stirs up strong feelings. You either love it or hate it, judging from the brief public discussion during lunch at the Financial Planning Association of Massachusetts’ (FPAMA) annual conference. The following ad was shown.

There was a call for feedback on the ad.

Respondent 1: I love it. I’m happy to pay more in dues.

Respondent 2: I don’t like it. It’s too frenetic.

Love and hate. That’s what I heard.

However, the conversation at my table was more nuanced.

Pro:
• Anything that builds the brand is good. This is just the first step in a long process.
• It’s good that the CFP mark is displayed prominently.
• It may be frenetic, but it’s eye-catching.

Con:
• Planners focus too much on the process. Consumers don’t care about the process.
• The ad doesn’t speak effectively about benefits to the consumer.

Blogging idea

Bloggers with the CFP credential may be able to start a conversation simply by posting the ad to their blogs. Or try addressing the questions that the ad raises for you.

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Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

You’re not alone if you feel uncomfortable responding to news of a death.

Photo: lisby1

“Ten Principles for Effective Grief Support,” an article by Amy Florian in The Journal of Financial Planning (February 2011) made me wonder what advice you have for this situation.

What do you say when you learn a client has lost a family member?

Are any of the following responses appropriate? What would YOU say?

• At least you still…
• Call me anytime you want to talk.
• How do you feel?
• How do you hope people will remember ___?
• I can’t imagine how you feel.
• I know how you feel.
• I’m so sorry.
• Is there anything I can do?
• Life will never be the same without ____.
• What happened?

Please answer the anonymous poll in the right-hand column of this blog. Comments are also welcome. In fact, they’re almost required because my dratted software lets you pick only one response to this complex situation.

I’ll report on the results in the next issue of my e-newsletter.

I look forward to learning from you.

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Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

Website bounce rates puzzle me. So I read guest blogger Tom Mangan’s article with interest. It seems as if you should put the most important information up top, where people will see it. Hmm, that sounds similar to good writing, so it’s not surprising that I met Tom through a community of freelance writers.

Blogging: why you want a better bounce rate

By Tom Mangan

Ever ask yourself where people go when they end up at your website? For most of my blogging life, the answer seemed like “somewhere else, as fast as their fingers can click.” That’s because up until a couple months ago, I ignored a key statistic called “bounce rate” that was telling me my blog needed a healthy tweak.

credit: www.clker.com

Bounce rate is one of the key metrics available free from Google Analytics. It tells you how many people visit one page at your blog and bail, typically by clicking the “back” button.

Web traffic gurus know most people make snap decisions about whether your page has something they’re looking for. You’ve got maybe five to 10 seconds to reel them in.

Like way too many blogs, my hiking blog had a standard layout with a header identifying what my site was about, a headline revealing what an individual page is about, and social links like e-mail, Twitter and Facebook. People who came my site had no earthly idea it was brimming with five years worth of content painstakingly compiled to warm a hiker’s heart. Typically over three-quarters of my site’s users left almost immediately; my bounce rate was 75 to 80 percent, day in and day out.

Then I changed to a new WordPress theme that allowed me to install all these cool navigation menus across the top, identifying all the many categories inside my site:

Immediately my bounce rate plunged below 50 percent — roughly a 50 percent improvement.

The game changer: I gave my readers something other than the “Back” button to click in that crucial first five seconds. Now roughly my half of my visitors click a second time. They longer they’re there, the better my chances of making them a regular reader.

If you’re thinking, “well, I’ve got all those links in the rail down the side of my site,” guess what: hardly anybody ever clicks on those. After the top two or three on the list, most get ignored.

Interestingly (or frustratingly, depending on how you look it), the big boost in bounce numbers did not equate, as near as I could tell, to a huge increase in page views. Page views were up, but I had also added new site features, and it was springtime, prime hiking season, when my site’s traffic always rises anyway, so I can’t say conclusively that it helped my raw page count. Furthermore, it appeared that the click-through rate on my Google ads cratered about the same time I made this change, so giving people more click options could be double-edged sword if you earn a living from ad clicks.

But if you use your blog to demonstrate your expertise and connect with potential clients, you’re not fretting over the scraps that land in your Adsense account every couple months. You want to tell people who land at your blog — in that first crucial blink of an eye — that there’s gobs of content inside that they ought to check out if they don’t see anything they want right now. Mind you, site navigation is just one component of your bounce rate. These links explore it in much greater detail.

• Two Simple Rules for Fixing High Bounce Rate Pages
• Reduce Bound Rates: Fight for the Second Click
• Want to improve bounce rate? Six questions you must get right

Tom Mangan is the creator of Two- Heel Drive, a Hiking Blog, and the founder of Verb Nerd Industries, his freelance editing, writing and blogging service.

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Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

Making a career in investment management can challenge both women and men.

Photo by whiskymac

Here are some tips I’ve heard recently.

On bosses, mentors, and sponsors

• “Having a boss who throws you into the deep end of the pool is a good thing.”
• Look for sponsors who’ll throw their weight behind you. They’re different from mentors who only give you advice.

Work–life balance

• Outsource everything.
• “I don’t cook. I don’t clean. I don’t iron.”
• Find a good nanny. Don’t be upset if your children love them. Pay them well.
• Give up stuff. You may need to narrow your life to only work and time with your family.
• “Don’t be a guilty mom.” Guilty moms overindulge their kids.
• Take a child – just one, if you have more than one – on a business trip. You’ll create a wonderful memory that’ll last for years.

Do you have career advice or an interesting story to share?

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Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

Liquid metaphors dominate our discussion of money, said New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks in “Poetry for Everyday Life,” his April 12 column.

For example, said Brooks, “We dip into savings, sponge off friends or skim funds off the top. Even the job title stockbroker derives from the French word brocheur, the tavern worker who tapped the kegs of beer to get the liquidity flowing.”

Your challenge is to suggest fresh metaphors for money. You can tackle one of the phrases in Brooks’ sentence or something of your own choice.

Please post your suggestion as a comment on this blog post.

_______________________________________________________________
Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

“Prosecutors Hope Verdict Will Be a Deterrent to Others,” says the headline about Raj Rajaratnam’s conviction in this morning’s print edition of The New York Times.

What grabbed me about the headline is how easily I could shorten it.

I know what I’d do, but what about you? Please post your answer below.

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Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

Sometimes it pays for financial writers to get possessive.

No, I’m not suggesting that you jealously hoard your office supplies or isolate your clients from other professionals. This is a writing tip.

Instead, I’m suggesting that you use the possessive case to shorten phrases.

For example, turn “The tone of the market improved by Friday” into “The market’s tone improved by Friday.”

The next time you find a sentence including “the X of Y,” see if it sounds better rephrased as “Y’s X.”

Plain English means writing sentences that flow better. It’s not only about choosing more basic words.

_______________________________________________________________
Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

People absorb messages better when words are complemented by an image. This is a rule that any writer can exploit.

Take my dinner at Casa Oaxaca on a Mexican vacation. It was a multi-course tasting menu, so I could gloss over the chapulines in the taquitos de jicama con  chapulines, quesillo y cuitlacoche. But then the dish captured in the photo to your right arrived.

Do you see the little antennae and the translucent wings?

I could no longer ignore the inclusion of toasted grasshoppers (chapulines) in my food. Good thing they were tasty!

Properly used, photos and other images add oomph to your written communications.

Tips for finding images

1. Look for the noun.

Finding an image is easy when you write about a concrete topic like grasshoppers. Simply search your favorite photo bank for your thing–the noun you’re writing about. Check my earlier blog post for free or low-cost photo sources.

2. Illustrate the adjective, verb or emotion.

What can you do when your subject is more abstract than grasshoppers?

I follow the advice of writer Erik Sherman:

Remember that none of your stories are about abstract topics. They are always tangible to someone. It might help to stop thinking about the topic – the noun – and focus on what people are doing – the verb – or what they’re feeling – the adjective. In a given investment story, someone is either making or losing money. It often happens in some industry, like real estate, high tech, or commodities. There may be regulatory aspects, in which case think about images that could represent regulation, like police holding a hand up to tell traffic to stop, a judge, Congress. The more tangible and simple you get about the topic, the easier it will be to think of a fitting image.

Financial blogger Chuck Rylant cracked this problem in his “Controversy Over Disappearing CalPERS Police Officer Retirement Benefits” blog post. He illustrated the adjective “disappearing” instead of the difficult-to-depict noun, “retirement benefits.” Plus, the sinking ship in his illustration reinforced the message that the benefits are disappearing.

Can you add any tips for illustrating blog posts and other written communications?

May 4 UPDATE: Denise Wakeman has a great post on this topic today. Check out “4 Ways Images Enhance Your Business Blog [Free Report].”

_______________________________________________________________
Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

The Wall Street Journal continues to highlight the case for plain English. An article, “A Tip for Financial Advisers: When Possible, Use English,” expands on the ideas introduced in the video.

If you like this article-video combo, you may also enjoy former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt’s opinion essay, which I discussed in “The Levitt test for financial risk disclosures.”

_______________________________________________________________
Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.